It seems they only had 5 total of the Exocets to fire.

One hit the HMS Sheffield, two hit the merchant ship Atlantic Conveyor, and one hit the destroyer HMS Glamorgan. So that's 4 of the 5.

I think they just ran out of missiles.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17256975

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocet#The_Falklands_War

It's also worth to note the hit to HMS Glamorgan required Argentina to hack a pair of Exocets to fire them from land without any cooperation from France, which was quite impressive.

I thought that some French tech support/engineers from the company building the missiles stayed in Argentina to continue their job. Same with the French people supporting the French-made airplanes.

Edit: even if France supported the UK during the war, preventing the delivery of more exocet missiles and providing information on the missiles and airplanes to the UK.

Edit 2: Apparently it was an oversight, the French team in Argentina was never told to stop working. Also I guess the missile builder might have been happy to have a live fire demonstration of his products

Yes, I think it was a great ad campaign. A much inferior airforce posed serious trouble to a big power thanks to their great product.

To be fair, Israel also advised Argentina on air-to-sea surface attack tactics that proved to be seriously good.

> A much inferior airforce posed serious trouble to a big power thanks to their great product.

There's no denying their effectiveness in this example, but then the context was the UK was fighting a conflict halfway across the world and without air superiority. Take away either of those elements and the Super Etendards were likely to have been obliterated long before their Exocets were within range.

Nobody said it was an easy conflict to fight for the UK. But Argentina was also ill prepared. They should have waited a few months till they received a whole batch of Exocets, which was already bought and in production. With many Exocets, they could have launched a saturation attack which would have caused serious damage to the British fleet.

Furthermore, waiting would have meant the islands would have entered Antartic winter shortly after invasion, giving them many months to dig in and prepare for UK Task Force landings.

It was a gamble to distract from problems at home.

There where probably career officers raising all the issues you did and more but it didn’t matter.

It’s interesting to speculate what thatcher would have done had the Argentines managed to sink enough ships to end the first Task Force, we where already fighting at our limits (which showed just how poor our equipment and spending was, lions lead by donkeys still applied), force project is hard, force projection for a 2nd rate power (if we class superpowers as 1st rate) at best is ridiculously hard.

I have a vague memory that there were also problems with the Sea Wolf based defence system on the ships. The controlling software apparently recognised the incoming Exocets as friendly. I don't know if there is any credibility to this but I am sure it would have been fixed pretty rapidly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Wolf_(missile)

The problem was more that the only ships with Sea Wolf - which was the only thing we had at the time that COULD have taken out the exocets - were guarding the carrier group during the loss of Sheffield.

AFTER the loss of sheffield, the policy was changed such that each class 42 was escorted by a class 22 (with sea wolfs).

The Argentian navy did hit Glamorgan with an exocet after that, but Glamorgan wasn't anywhere near anything with Sea Wolf defenses at the time.

The 'friendly' aspect is likely apocryphal, and possibly based on the fact that the Glamorgan and Antrim were both exocet missile destroyers themselves, and might thus have had issues with targetting a missile of the same type. But since neither of them had any point-defence systems it was moot.

edit: or it may be from the fact that Broadsword's sea wolf system 'locked up' during the sinking of Coventry, and was unable to attack the inbound A4s that bombed Coventry. But from what I can see, the prevailing belief was that it was unable to lock on for the same reason Sea Dart on Coventry wouldn't - it couldn't discriminate the A4s from the land behind them.

According to an army grunt friend of mine, there's a truism in his profession which goes "Friendly fire... ISN'T!"

Joking aside, I would assume current IFF systems let you define anything not explicitly friendly as hostile - what with shifting alliances, armament development consolidation &c - the issue being how many backdoors there are. I take it as a given no US-made missile can kill a US-operated aircraft, regardless of what the operator of the missile desires. (Same goes for French, British, Russian &c)

> I take it as a given no US-made missile can kill a US-operated aircraft,

I'm not so sure about that. That would require that all US made missiles have a "disarm" signal that the operators cannot override. Maybe for weapons we sell that is okay, but for our own use, that strikes me as too much of a liability if that signal ever gets compromised and spoofed.

The list of designed obsolescences on the part of weapons manufacturers and war profiteers is too long to bear.

Every single weapon can be turned on its maker, somehow. Else, its not an effective weapon.

"There are no missed shots, just some bullets containing 'To whom it may concern'".

I heard something similar, I believe reported by the television news program “60 Minutes”, but the report I remember was about the Phalanx missile defense system not recognizing the Exocet as an “enemy” missile since it was a NATO weapon.

Edit: Note that I’m working off of very old memories, and the 60 minutes reports may not have been accurate.

None of the UK ships had Phalanx at that point in time, so it can't have been that.

FWIW, I was in high school at the time and I remember something similar.

>I once heard unsourced speculation that the French might have given the British the scoop on how to sabotage incoming missiles.

reminded by association - in the new Russian&Serbian movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Balkan_Line released for the 20th anniversary of the war there is a scene with the French bomb dropped on a house in Serbia and which didn't explode because it was intentionally sabotaged. Doesn’t seem to have propaganda value, and I’m wondering whether it is a play on real facts or just an artistic reference to the French resistance to the NATO bombing of civilian targets.